Dear Colleagues,

We are delighted to reopen the Special Issue on “Organic Photovoltaics”, launched a year ago. The previous inspiring author contributions highlighted the importance of interdisciplinarity and interlaboratory collaboration approaches.¹

With this second part, we hope to continue on this path, and bring an inspiring view on current trends and research focuses within the exciting and rapidly-evolving field of polymer-based organic photovoltaics.

In response to other competing technologies, organic photovoltaics have progressed significantly over recent years, with both small molecule and polymeric electron donors now affording power conversion efficiencies above 10% in single junction devices with fullerene electron acceptors. While fullerene-based acceptors are still dominating the research landscape, a great deal of research has recently been devoted to the development of alternative non-fullerene acceptors. This area is currently undergoing a prolific development with numerous small molecule and polymeric acceptor materials emerging as promising candidates that provide alternatives to PCBM and which further advance the field of organic photovoltaics.

The efficiency boost promised by multi-junction devices has sparked a renewed interest in efficient wide band gap donor materials and in extremely narrow band gap materials, so as to cover as much of the solar spectrum as possible. Recent years have also seen a stronger focus on solar cell device morphology and stability; it is becoming clear that understanding and controlling blend morphology is crucial for improving photovoltaic device stability.

Although much progress has been made in the field, major challenges still have to be overcome in order to drive this technology forward towards the realization of efficient, cheap, and flexible organic solar cells that are compatible with environmentally friendly, high throughput printing technologies. This Special Issue of Polymers will address some of these remaining challenges, with a focus on polymeric photoactive materials and their structure-property relationships in the context of solar cell performance, blend morphology control, and operational stability.

Dr. Christian B. Nielsen
Dr. Laure Biniek
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Polymers is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

 References

¹ Biniek, L.; Nielsen, C.B. Organic Photovoltaics: More than Ever, an Interdisciplinary Field. Polymers 2016, 8, 70

• Organic photovoltaics
• Polymeric photoactive materials
• New synthetic methodologies toward photoactive materials
• Environmentally friendly synthesis of photoactive materials
• Non-fullerene acceptors
• Polymer-polymer solar cells
• Organic photovoltaic device stability
• Bulk heterojunction blend morphology
• Multi-junction organic solar cells
• Large scale device processing
• Environmentally friendly device processing

• Organic Photovoltaics in Polymers (7 articles)